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A Passage West

I was grateful to read Kathryn Schulz’s enthusiastic review of Rachel Cockerell’s book “Melting Point,” which traces an early-twentieth-century effort to resettle Jewish immigrants in Texas (Books, May 5th). But I was puzzled by a line where Schulz states, “The need to find a haven for persecuted Jews is never not urgent; the process of trying to find one is never not disgraceful.” Schulz touches on many such efforts, including one in which the British government proposed donating a swath of Kenya. However, if there is something disgraceful about the Galveston Plan, the focus of Cockerell’s book, Schulz does not allude to it.

Mark Goodman
Cambridge, Mass.

Mark Twain’s Fixations

Lauren Michele Jackson, in her review of Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain, deftly enumerates Twain’s enthusiasms, including the more discomfiting ones (Books, May 5th). Her discussion of the young girls he professed to “collect” late in life, whom he referred to as “angelfish,” put me in mind of his obsession with another young woman: Joan of Arc.

In his final years, Twain was positively besotted with the late-medieval French heroine. In 1896, he published a massive historical novel centered on her life, “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte.” Its detractors did not deter him from returning to Joan: in 1904, he published the essay “Saint Joan of Arc,” in Harper’s—still one of the most exhilarating pieces of writing about her—in which he called her “easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”

Joan Hinde Stewart
Durham, N.C.

Talking Trash

I was delighted by Diego Lasarte’s article about inspectors checking that landlords are adhering to New York City’s new composting laws (The Talk of the Town, May 5th). I was particularly happy to read that the sanitation worker Thomas Crespo, after digging through a trash bin barehanded, said, “Soap and water will do.” For years, I’ve been advocating for the proper separation of recycling, and I have been disturbed by people’s aversion to touching their own garbage. And don’t get me started on antibacterial soap, which always comes in plastic packaging—an environmental nightmare—and has been shown to promote antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It was heartening to read that there are city employees fighting this battle with much more equanimity than I.

Ingrid Good
Berkeley, Calif.

Birds of Brooklyn

I want to thank Ian Frazier for his article about pigeons in New York City (“Pigeon Toes,” May 12th & 19th). When I was young, in the nineteen-forties, my father raised pigeons on the rooftop of our walkup, in Brooklyn. He worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and after dinner, while my mother was busy with my newborn twin siblings, my father and I would go to our roof, and I’d watch him take care of his pigeons. I remember seeing him flag down a stray by waving a pole with one of the twin’s diapers on the end. If he attracted a stray, he’d cut the ring off its leg and add one of his own, like in a marriage ceremony. One day, he gave me my own pigeon, placing it in my hands—I could feel its heartbeat—and showing me how to handle it without disturbing its feathers.

Evelyn Livingston
Camas, Wash.

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

Who will help lead the Department of Government Efficiency now that Elon Musk has left the scene? News reports have mentioned Joe Gebbia, a Tesla board member and a co-founder of Airbnb, as a possible replacement. Gebbia is forty-three. Like Musk—his close friend—he is a billionaire, a resident of Austin, Texas, and the rumored recipient of a hair transplant. Gebbia formally announced his political conversion on X in January, posting that, after years of supporting Democrats, he finally “did [his] own research” and concluded that Donald Trump “deeply cares about our nation.” His feed has a MAHA flavor: Big Food exposés (“The truth about Ketchup”) alternate with digs at liberals suffering from “TDS,” or Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Unlike Musk, Gebbia was trained not as an engineer but as a designer. Upon joining DOGE, in February, he pledged to bring his “designer brain and startup spirit” to the task of cutting two trillion dollars from the federal budget. One of his early projects: digitizing the retirement process for federal workers. He mused to Fox News’ Bret Baier that, under DOGE’s influence, interacting with the government could soon resemble “an Apple Store-like experience.”

At the Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned degrees in industrial design and graphic design in the early two-thousands, Gebbia was known as a gregarious, prematurely balding student with a signature pair of machine-shop safety glasses. “Joe always had a finger in every pie,” Chris Saltzman, a former classmate, recalled. Gebbia worked in the dining room at the University Club and gave tours for the admissions office. “I was, like, ‘Whoa, this guy is so on point. He’s going places,’ ” Loren Klein, a freelance graphic designer in Denver, said of his Gebbia-led RISD tour. Gebbia also knew how to have fun. One night, Klein found himself with Gebbia and two female students, “eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts and running into the ocean in our underwear.”

Gebbia’s reformist streak showed up early. He was president of the RISD student council, which at one point formed a DOGE-like “committee to investigate the effectiveness of the faculty advisor program.” “This is not some high school council that has no real impact or influence,” Gebbia’s council announced, according to a report in a student paper. “I don’t remember this investigation,” Saltzman said. He added, “The council was a nonentity.”

Like Musk, Gebbia demonstrated a flair for showmanship. “He always walked around campus toting these butt pads,” Saltzman recalled. The pads—called CritBuns—were brightly colored, cheek-shaped cushions meant to ease the pain of long critique sessions on hard floors. Gebbia sold them online, for twenty dollars, and at the MOMA Design Store. (A review in Wired: “It feels like I’m getting a perpetual, gentle ass massage.”) The school commissioned eight hundred as graduation gifts for Gebbia’s class.

But Gebbia’s most lasting contribution to RISD may have been reviving the school’s defunct basketball team, the Balls. They were not the only provocatively named team on campus. RISD’s athletics also included the Nads (hockey), the Sacks (men’s soccer), and the Jugs (women’s soccer). But drumming up enthusiasm for the enterprise wasn’t easy. “It presented one of the world’s greatest marketing challenges,” Gebbia told the hosts of the “Clever” podcast in 2017. “How do you get art students to a sporting event on a Friday night?” His roommate, the future Airbnb C.E.O. Brian Chesky, helped devise a solution: a seven-foot-tall anthropomorphic penis mascot named Scrotie.

Gebbia filed the paperwork, booked gym time at a local high school (RISD had no athletic facilities), and recruited a team—thirteen men, one woman. They played a J.V. squad from Worcester, Massachusetts, in their opening game. The Balls lost, 94–49, in front of a reported hundred and fifty fans (and a cheer squad, the Jock Straps). They went on to lose every game that season. “We took some beatings,” Matt Corrado, a muralist in Maryland who played guard with Gebbia, recalled. “Not much height. Nobody could dunk. Joe was an old-school guard, like John Stockton.” Still, Gebbia remained optimistic. In a 2002 article for a RISD publication, titled “We’ve Got Balls,” he compared the team’s budding rivalry with Cooper Union to “U.N.C. vs. Duke.” (The piece included a photo of Gebbia peering into his warmup sweats.)

If Gebbia does become the driving force at DOGE, scholars might examine “The Balls Initiative,” a guide on how to run the team, which Gebbia claims he wrote for future RISD athletes. Corrado has no recollection of it. “Though that does sound like Joe,” he said.

“It was a magical and simpler time then,” Saltzman said, reflecting on his art-school years—before Trump, COVID, and the era of billionaires minted by Airbnb. “It’s strange seeing Joe in a conservative, Republican space now. He was never that way at RISD.” ♦

Bach’s Mass in B Minor begins with a majestic howl of pain—four adagio bars that combine formal grandeur with writhing interior lines, as if figures in a cathedral frieze of the Last Judgment were coming to life. The text is “Kyrie eleison,” or “Lord, have mercy,” and the distribution of the words in the chorus suggests the flailing of a desperate crowd. Half the sopranos sing “Kyrie, Kyrie, eleison, eleison,” the other half sing “Kyrie, eleison, eleison, eleison”; the altos sing “Kyrie, eleison, Kyrie, eleison,” the tenors and basses “Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie, eleison.” Only the first and last chords in the sequence are solid triads, the rest tinged by dissonance to one degree or another. The orchestration is a touch grotesque, with the first violins given a shrill D two octaves above middle C. The bass line retreats toward the treble, creating further instability. After a moment of repose on F-sharp major, an immense fugue on “Kyrie eleison” unfolds, in two gradually cresting and subsiding waves—ten minutes of sublime churn.

A new recording of the B-Minor Mass by the French ensemble Pygmalion, under the direction of Raphaël Pichon, delivers that four-bar exordium with maximum force. The weight of the sound—incorporating five vocal soloists, thirty choristers, and thirty-three instrumentalists—harks back to lumbering mid-twentieth-century accounts by Otto Klemperer and Hermann Scherchen, before the original-instrument movement dictated light textures and fleet tempos. Yet period style still adheres, the timbres pungent rather than plush. Urgency animates each component of the whole, whether it’s the punchy “K”s in the male voices or the penetrating chants of “eleison” in the sopranos. A sharp intake of breath before the first chord heightens the impact. The plea for mercy is dire: arms are held up to ward off a blow.

Pichon, a former countertenor, founded Pygmalion in 2006, when he was still a student at the Paris Conservatory. The group began issuing recordings in 2008, first on the Alpha label and then on Harmonia Mundi. One early project was to document Bach’s “Missae Breves,” or short masses, among which is the Missa 1733, the source of the Kyrie and the Gloria sections of the B-Minor Mass. (Bach completed the full version of the Mass in 1749, at the end of his life; he never heard it whole.) From the start, Pygmalion’s musicians stood out, not so much for their pristine intonation and liquid legato—today’s early-music ensembles have transcended the scrawniness of yore—as for their vibrant phrasing, their bold colors, their air of spontaneous excitement. Lately, they’ve been tackling pinnacles of the sacred repertory: Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Mozart’s Requiem, and now the complete B-Minor Mass.

Pygmalion’s recording of the Mass has many stretches of sonic splendor, which bloom in the acoustic of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-du-Liban, in Paris, where Harmonia Mundi’s sessions took place. Purists may feel that Pichon and company have gone overboard, but, given that the Kyrie and the Gloria were intended for the glittering Dresden court, a bit of opulence seems apt. If the “Kyrie eleison” casts a chilly shadow, the closing movements of the various sections erupt with joyful noise, all skirling trumpets and banging drums. “Cum Sancto Spiritu” has a dancing drive; “Et expecto” is a virtual stampede; and “Dona nobis pacem” builds to sonorities so monumental that they threaten to put Bruckner out of business. (Play it loud.)

At the same time, this B-Minor Mass is notable for its intimacy, its confiding humanity. It’s not one of those self-serious endeavors in which everyone genuflects before God’s chosen composer. In “Laudamus te,” Sophie Gent, Pygmalion’s concertmaster, delivers her violin solos with an almost folkish twang, as if sauntering around while she plays. The flutist Georgia Browne brings conversational warmth to “Domine Deus,” with Thibaut Roussel strumming sympathetically on the theorbo. Alongside the radiant climaxes, the chorus achieves spells of shivering inwardness. In the nebula of chords that ushers in “Et expecto,” the prospect of the resurrection of the dead engenders an awed pianissimo on the word “mortuorum.”

As I followed along with the 2010 Bärenreiter edition of the score, I noticed how the musicians heed the dynamic and tempo markings that appear in the so-called Dresden parts—materials that Bach prepared for a prospective Dresden performance of the Kyrie and Gloria. The glacial pace of the “Kyrie eleison” introduction, for example, is justified by the indication “molto adagio”—“very slow”—in the cello part. (For whatever reason, Bach wrote only “adagio” elsewhere.) In “Laudamus te,” Gent syncopates the reprise of her opening line with a Lombard rhythm, in which a quick short note precedes a longer one; this, too, can be found in the Dresden parts. Such discrepancies in Bach’s manuscripts show that no definitive version of the Mass exists and that modern performers are free to follow their intuition.

Pygmalion’s effort, thrilling as it is, falls short of perfection, as every recording must. The vocal soloists are impeccable, yet only the mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot arrives at a really personal approach, her haunted, aching “Agnus Dei” setting the stage for the “Dona nobis pacem.” An oddly aggressive “Crucifixus” lacks mystery. The fast tempos verge on the hectic. Among latter-day accounts of the Mass, I’ll continue to revisit the devotional precision of the Bach Collegium Japan, the austere blendedness of the Netherlands Bach Society, and the chiaroscuro glow of the Collegium Vocale Gent. I also treasure the effusive pomp of Karl Richter, who led the first live performance of the Mass I heard, in 1978. But Pygmalion’s rendition, with its passionate embrace of human extremes, belongs among the greatest.

At the onset of this dark American summer, I’ve gone back and forth between Bach’s colossus and a contemporary creation of radically different character: Timothy McCormack’s hour-long piano work “mine but for its sublimation,” which has been recorded by Jack Yarbrough and released on Another Timbre. According to the composer’s program notes, the piece is “about letting go; othering; finding presence through evaporation. Obliteration.” The music is, for the most part, quiet and slow, often hovering at the edge of silence. Yet it has a cumulative power that left me a little dazed the first time I listened.

McCormack, who uses the pronoun “they,” was born in 1984, in Cleveland; studied at Oberlin, the University of Huddersfield, and Harvard; and is now based in San Diego. At first, their music tended toward density and frenzy, echoing the maximalist aesthetics of Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, and Chaya Czernowin, one of McCormack’s teachers. In recent years, they have adopted a sparser, if not simpler, style. The gently rocking, softly cryptic chords that inaugurate “mine but for its sublimation” bring Morton Feldman to mind, yet that impression dissipates as the soundscape grows more variegated and unpredictable: bell-like single tones, rumbling clusters, plinks and thumps from inside the piano, showers of harmonics produced by deploying e-bows, or electric bows, to vibrate the instrument’s strings without touching them. By the end, Yarbrough’s piano seems less a physical machine than a zone of resonance. “Presence through evaporation,” indeed.

About nineteen minutes in, after a meditative string of A-flats, a halting procession of some two hundred and seventy-five chords begins—permutations of eight basic types, containing up to twelve notes. It is opaque music, numbing at times, yet the ear soon picks out patterns. A rising line of B, D-flat, and E-flat makes itself felt, and before long those notes are ringing out in a short-long pattern, like a languid Lombard rhythm. The harmonies disperse and gravitate toward tonal nodes, until, suddenly, stunningly, pure E-flat major materializes. I thought of the “Et expecto” from the B-Minor Mass, which wanders from D major to the verge of oblivion. Here, something like the opposite happens, though only for a moment. The tonal mirage vanishes. Perhaps the proximity of the Mass affected my thinking, but I heard that E-flat chord as a spiritual event. It was as if no such chord had existed before or would exist again. ♦

American sports come with implied narratives. The story of baseball is fundamentally nostalgic, connecting us to childhood and to the country’s pastoral beginnings. Football tells a story of manly grit, with echoes of the battlefield. Basketball is the city game, as the sportswriter Pete Axthelm called it half a century ago, and its chief narrative, for decades, was about escaping the ghetto. Religious metaphors run hotter in basketball than in other sports: when Spike Lee set out to make an ode to New York City hoops, he named his protagonist Jesus Shuttlesworth, for the N.B.A. Hall of Famer Earl (Jesus) Monroe; LeBron James appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated at the age of seventeen as “The Chosen One.” Every tall and prodigiously skilled teen-ager feels like an act of God. And no sport, perhaps other than soccer, with its pibes and craques—the impoverished dribbling and juggling machines who hope to become the next Maradona or Pelé—so deeply mythologizes the search for talent. The savior of your N.B.A. franchise might be getting left off his high-school team in Wilmington, North Carolina, or he might be selling sunglasses on the streets of Athens, Greece, to help his Nigerian immigrant parents make ends meet, or he might be living with his mother in a one-bedroom apartment in Akron, Ohio. You just have to find him.

At least, that was the story. On a recent episode of “Mind the Game,” the podcast that LeBron James hosts with the coach and former point guard Steve Nash, James spoke with the young N.B.A. superstar Luka Dončić about how different James’s hoops upbringing had been from that of kids today. On the playgrounds of Akron, James said, he would play 21, in which the person with the ball tries to score against everyone else. Such games taught him how to improvise, how to get around multiple defenders and create scoring opportunities out of nothing. James is a father of two sons, who mostly learned how to play basketball “indoors,” in a “programmed” environment, he said. They were taught the game by a fleet of coaches and other professionals. “I didn’t have a basketball trainer until second, third, maybe fourth year in the N.B.A.,” James went on. “My basketball training was just being on the court.” Last year, Dončić founded a nonprofit that focusses on youth basketball; in December, the organization published a report arguing that, as youth sports have professionalized, they have become more exclusive, sucking the “joy” out of the game.

A video clip of the podcast was posted on TikTok, and the top comment beneath it reads, “Lebron will be one of the last superstars that’s from the ghetto, basketballs like golf now it’s a tutelage sport.” That might not be entirely true; if a seven-foot-two teen-age Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were walking around any neighborhood in New York today, he wouldn’t get far without a wannabe agent stopping him in the street. But, putting aside such once-in-a-generation talents, the landscape of the league has subtly changed. James and his older son, LeBron (Bronny) James, Jr., made N.B.A. history last year by suiting up as teammates, for the Los Angeles Lakers. And, while that was a first, being a second-generation N.B.A. player is becoming almost unremarkable. In 2009, ten players in the league had fathers who’d played for N.B.A. teams; this past season, there were thirty-five. The future promises even more hoop legacies. The likely No. 2 pick in the upcoming draft is Dylan Harper, whose father, Ron, played with Michael Jordan on the Chicago Bulls. Lists of top high-school recruits include the names Anthony, as in Carmelo, and Arenas, as in Gilbert. James’s younger son, Bryce, has committed to play for the University of Arizona and could also reach the N.B.A. soon.

Genetics is the most obvious explanation: if your dad is six feet eight and your mom is six feet two, you stand a better chance of guarding Kevin Durant—or Durant’s kids—than my children will ever have. But the N.B.A. has been around for almost eighty years, and the number of roster spots in the league has barely changed since the mid-nineties. If all that mattered were good genes, the influx of second-generation players would have shown up thirty years ago. Why the spike now?

To answer that question, one N.B.A. executive told me, you probably have to look at the economy of basketball development. The children of pros are generally wealthy and well connected; they have access to “better training, coaching, and the right people who can put them on the right lists,” the executive said. “Those early edges accumulate.” Increasingly, players are made as much as they are born, and making those players costs money. A star prospect requires a set of physical gifts that might as well be divine in origin. But, to compete now, he will also likely need the kinds of resources that you have to buy, and a small industry has arisen to sell them.

“It’s getting too expensive for some kids to even play, and the pressure to be perfect takes away the love for the game,” Dončić told me. “I think about my daughter and wonder what sports will feel like for her one day.” Jay Williams, a basketball analyst at ESPN who was the second pick in the 2002 N.B.A. draft, said to me, “When I came into the league in the early two-thousands, player development was mostly raw talent, repetition, and survival.” Now, he said, “development starts younger, it’s more specialized, and it’s driven by business.” Jermaine O’Neal, a six-time N.B.A. All-Star who recently founded a basketball-centered prep school, told me, “The cost of everything has changed.” O’Neal, like James, grew up with a single mother in a working-class area of a small city. Sports in general, O’Neal said, are “pricing out a percentage of athletes raised in communities like mine.”

The professionalization of youth sports has changed not only who reaches the N.B.A. but how the game is played when they get there. Watching the post-season this year, I found the level of play to be possibly higher than ever. But I felt little emotional connection to the game. Like many fans, I complain about the number of three-point shots that teams are taking, which turns so many games into an almost cynical exercise in playing the odds. Today’s style is also more rehearsed, more optimized. This, I believe, can be traced to the way that the players are learning the game from an early age—to the difference between a childhood spent outdoors with your friends, competing against grown men, and one spent as a customer, with a cadre of coaches who push you only in the ways that you or, in most cases, your parents approve of.

“What used to be driven by someone’s hunger to improve, to figure it out and work to get better, becomes a job for a lot of these kids so early,” Steve Nash told me. This, he added, meant “essentially trading their enjoyment and motivation for a calculated approach that may be more suitable to young adults than young kids.”

“You know that stupid thing that you said at a party when you were in your twenties that you thought made everybody hate you and it kept you up at night for years after? You were right to be concerned.”

Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers

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Does this shift also help explain why the N.B.A. has struggled to find its next superstars, successors to James, Steph Curry, and others of their generation? Perhaps. It’s true that a number of today’s best players—Dončić, Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo—are from other countries, and many Americans crave homegrown heroes. But the leading players in this year’s finals, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, of the Oklahoma City Thunder, and Tyrese Haliburton, of the Indiana Pacers, are North American. (Gilgeous-Alexander is from Canada.) The former plays a throwback game that involves a lot of slithering through tight spaces; the latter makes surprising, lightning-quick passes and fires his jump shots with an awkward motion that resembles an old man pushing his grandchild on a swing. Yet neither player has caught the public imagination in the manner of a James or a Curry or a Durant. When fans argue about the next face of the league, they usually bring up Anthony Edwards, the charismatic guard on the Minnesota Timberwolves, or Ja Morant, of the Memphis Grizzlies, who floats through the air like his bones are hollow before exploding into some of the most violent dunks the league has ever seen. They are the basketball equivalents of James Brown: undeniably virtuosic, always on point, but with so much confidence and brio that they feel unpredictable and capable of anything. The new N.B.A. archetype, in contrast, feels more like an “American Idol” singing machine—technically flawless and with unlimited range, but ultimately forgettable for everyone except the vocal coaches on YouTube.

What happened? Once, a serious basketball prospect might simply play on his local high-school team and then head off to college. Nowadays, he will likely attend multiple schools, seeking exposure, playing time, and competition. The trend began slowly, in the nineteen-eighties, when secondary schools with big-time basketball programs—notably, Oak Hill Academy, in rural Virginia, the alma mater of Rod Strickland, Anthony, and Durant—began recruiting the country’s best players. Soon, explicitly sports-centered schools emerged. The talent agency IMG purchased the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, in Florida, and expanded it to include other sports, adding basketball in 2001. Five years later, Cliff Findlay, a Las Vegas businessman who had made his money in car dealerships, opened Findlay Prep, which was, arguably, just a basketball team—a dozen or so boys from all over the world who played games around the country and took classes at a private school a few minutes away from the gym where they practiced. Findlay Prep won three national high-school titles in four years and produced eighteen N.B.A. players. It closed down, in 2019, when the nearby private school ended the partnership. Suddenly, Findlay’s students had nowhere to go to class.

This spring, I flew to Dallas to visit Dynamic Prep, the school that Jermaine O’Neal founded in 2022. It has eleven students, all of them Division I basketball prospects. Monday through Friday, the students gather at a twenty-four-thousand-square-foot training facility just north of the city. In the morning, they sit in a classroom and take an N.C.A.A.-approved curriculum of online courses. Then they head to the gym for strength training and conditioning, before basketball practice in the afternoon.

When I arrived, Dynamic’s student body was on the court. The team had recently been ranked tenth in the country by ESPN, helping it qualify as a late addition to the Chipotle Nationals, an annual tournament that unofficially crowns the country’s high-school champions. But Dynamic would face long odds against more established programs, including IMG Academy and Montverde Academy, another Florida school that consistently produces N.B.A. draft picks. And practice wasn’t going well. O’Neal, who is the head coach of the team in addition to being the school’s founder, stood on the sidelines, his arms crossed. He is nearly seven feet tall, with a high forehead and a dimpled chin; he still appears to be more or less in playing shape. The team had been running half-court sets for nearly thirty minutes, but nobody was where he was supposed to be—not even Jermaine O’Neal, Jr., the team’s small forward. O’Neal, Sr., had spent the first half of practice quietly simmering; then one player missed a defensive rotation and asked his flummoxed coach what was wrong. “Your demeanor!” O’Neal yelled, before ordering the player off the court. Another kid replaced him, and the ball was passed back to the top of the key. The drill began again.

O’Neal grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and counts thirty-two siblings among his relatives. His mother taught him almost everything; he didn’t meet his father until he was thirty years old. At seventeen, just a few years after growing about nine inches in three months, he became one of the youngest players ever to reach the N.B.A. when he was drafted in the first round by the Portland Trail Blazers. He was part of a generation who skipped college entirely; the sports media was largely skeptical of kids who turned down college scholarships in favor of N.B.A. dollars, and these teen-agers often found themselves competing for playing time against men more than a decade older. O’Neal rode the bench for four years. But veterans on the team made sure that he understood his place on the roster and how to act like a professional. When he was traded to the Indiana Pacers, after his fourth season, he flourished.

O’Neal credits the playgrounds of his childhood with giving him instincts on the court and helping instill the resilience to endure what felt like an ignoble start to his career. He knows that the kids he coaches aren’t getting that kind of real-world instruction, and so he looks for ways to simulate it. “I’m taking a little bit of the hardship mind-set of how I grew up, and I’m bringing it to this new-school mind-set and mixing it,” he told me. The team’s intense practices and his focus on defense are partly meant to create an experience of adversity. He believes that his job is not only to prepare his players for what comes after Dynamic in college or in the pros but also to protect them from it. “Your coaches won’t love you—you’re just getting them closer to another win,” he yelled at one point during practice. “Once you get on campus, your parents will never be able to help you.”

In O’Neal’s view, a school like Dynamic is more sensitive to the needs of young athletes than traditional options are. Before founding the school, he created Drive Nation, a home for youth basketball and volleyball teams which was headquartered next to the car-rental center at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. Drive Nation’s teams were affiliated with the Amateur Athletic Union, or A.A.U., an umbrella organization for club teams which, in the past twenty-five years, has become a major part of youth sports. At the time, O’Neal’s daughter, Asjia, was one of the top high-school volleyball players in the country. But, during her junior year, she told her parents that she was burned out: full-time school followed by practice and training—plus the travel and stress that came with playing for a club team and the United States youth program—had been too much. O’Neal began reading about other approaches to youth sports, and he talked to coaches in Europe. He learned about the Continent’s academy system, which plucks promising athletes at an early age and gives them a more specialized path, organizing their lives largely around their sport. Dynamic is his attempt to bring that system to the U.S.

Most of the kids at Dynamic won’t make the N.B.A., but all of them could play for major college programs—and big-time college basketball is a lucrative endeavor in itself. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that N.C.A.A. restrictions on the payment of student athletes were a violation of antitrust law; now student athletes can make money by selling their name, image, and likeness. Bronny James reportedly earned nearly six million dollars from such N.I.L. deals—with Nike, Beats by Dre, and other companies—before he left college. And you don’t have to be LeBron James’s son, or even a top N.B.A. prospect, to do well. R. J. Davis, a talented but undersized guard, spent five seasons at the University of North Carolina, becoming the second-highest scorer in the program’s history; he may not get an N.B.A. paycheck anytime soon, but he racked up at least twenty-five N.I.L. deals last year, which paid him more than two and a half million dollars. Players like him are staying in college longer than before, and many of them move around to pursue the best and most profitable opportunities by registering with the N.C.A.A.’s transfer portal, which notifies coaches at other colleges about the players who are newly available for recruiting. The day I visited Dynamic, the transfer portal had just opened up, and O’Neal informed his kids, early in practice, how many players had entered it. This, he was suggesting, is what they were up against: hundreds of young men vying for a limited number of spots that could be worth millions of dollars.

After practice, he gathered the team around him. “What do you all want?” he asked. The players hung their heads. “I’m going to be real with you,” he said. “Today was not good enough.” If the team hoped to succeed at the Chipotle Nationals, they would have to put in more effort. O’Neal pointed out that the number of players in the transfer portal had gone up since that morning. “Seven hundred in the portal now,” he said. “It’s a record. Every year, it’s a fucking record.” Then he repeated his question. “What is it you want?”

It’s an old complaint, but it’s still true: kids who have been given everything may end up lacking motivation. “I wish I’d had the access my kids have—the trainers, the recovery tools, the mental-health support,” Jay Williams told me. “It’s a smarter system now, but what I want to pass down to them is the hunger, the grit.” O’Neal made more than a hundred and sixty-seven million dollars in his playing career, and he has struggled to impart the lessons he learned in his childhood to Jermaine, Jr. “I had this thing where I’d say to him, ‘Man, you don’t understand how good you got it,’ ” he told me. “ ‘The only thing you’re missing is hardship. You fly on private jets. You drive a Range Rover. You’ve had a chef your entire life.’ I have literally missed meals. I’ve literally had one pair of shoes that were my school shoes, my basketball shoes, and, if I went to church, they were my church shoes.”

“I never wanted my kids to live like that, and I didn’t want to live like that,” he went on. “So I would ask Jermaine, Jr., ‘What are you starving for?’ And he couldn’t answer the question.” Eventually, Jermaine, Jr., came up with a response: he needed an emotional break from living in the shadow of both his dad and his coach. O’Neal has been trying to give him one.

Youth basketball is not an outlier in its trend toward professionalization. You can see the same story in countless aspects of American life. Fierce competition breeds cottage industries that promise advantages to the children of parents who can afford them. Those children crowd out their peers, and the path to upward mobility narrows. The kids playing sports at big-time college programs are examples of this trend, but so are many of the straight-A students who attend classes at those same colleges, whose parents may have paid for private tutors and consultants to help secure admission. Children from poorer families have to be extraordinary or they will fall behind.

The most highly touted prospect at Dynamic Prep, according to ESPN, is not Jermaine O’Neal, Jr.—the twenty-second-ranked small forward in the country—but another child of professional athletes. Marcus Spears, Jr., is the son of a retired N.F.L. defensive lineman and a former W.N.B.A. player, Aiysha Spears. June, as his parents call him, is six feet eight, with long arms and the lankiness of a teen-ager who is still growing. He can shoot from outside, defend at the rim, and trigger a fast break after a rebound. If he grows a few more inches, he’ll be the same height as Durant, one of his favorite players; his loping but graceful gait calls to mind a young Antetokounmpo. It may be ludicrous to invoke such superstars when discussing a kid who just turned sixteen, but scouting is an exercise in imagination, one in which the most salient inputs are limitations—if a prospect has T. rex arms or shoots like he’s angry at the ball, his spectrum of possibility shrinks. June was averaging fewer than seven points a game, but he has uncapped potential: you can map his body, skills, and movements onto many of the best players in the N.B.A. He’s currently the third-ranked high-school sophomore in the country, at any position in the game.

He’s also, for now, younger and skinnier than most of his teammates. At practice, I watched him get pushed around while his father paced the sidelines. Marcus Spears, Sr., was a football star at Louisiana State University before playing eight seasons for the Dallas Cowboys and another for the Baltimore Ravens. He’s now one of ESPN’s premier football analysts. On TV, he is self-deprecating and exceedingly likable, but on the sidelines he was like every other anxious basketball dad: muttering to himself when June didn’t rotate fast enough on defense, staring morosely at the floor when June took a spill onto the hardwood. When June declined to shoot an open jumper, he yelled, “Take the shot!”

Later that day, I visited Marcus and Aiysha Spears at their seven-thousand-square-foot house in a gated community near where the Cowboys practice. Aiysha grew up in Detroit—“the city,” she told me, “not the surrounding areas”—and was reared, in her early years, by a mother who wanted her to become a swimmer. Her mother died when Aiysha was thirteen, and she decided to take up basketball, mostly playing for her local school teams, with some A.A.U., too. “I was travelling by myself to tournaments,” she told me. “My mother passed away, my father wasn’t in my life, and my grandparents didn’t know what to do, so they trusted my coaches to handle it and make sure that I was O.K. I would be in Indiana or Chicago, and they definitely couldn’t pay to come watch me play in a tournament. The hundred and fifty dollars or whatever it would cost to see me, that was our electricity bill.”

Marcus, whose extensive array of barbecuing equipment sat on the back patio, grew up in a blue-collar family in Baton Rouge. His mother was a telephone operator for Bell South, and his father worked as an electrician before getting a job at the Georgia-Pacific paper mill. Spears echoed the other former pros I talked to when he described how he learned to play sports: “outside,” mostly in pickup games with older boys. Now he’s trying to teach toughness to his son. “I was super hard on June when he was young,” he told me. “I was looking at it from a prism of knowing what he was going to actually be. Like, ‘Your mom is six foot two, bro, and I’m a pro football player. She’s a pro basketball player. You’re going to be the one per cent of the one per cent of what you’re doing.’ ” He prodded his son to work harder, even cursing at him the way he knew June’s coaches someday would. “But I probably started a little too early with him, at seven or eight years old,” he said. “I still have to check myself at times now and realize he’s still fifteen years old, because when I was fifteen I wasn’t even close to what he is doing now.” Spears wants his son to succeed, and he knows that college sports have changed. “When I got to L.S.U., I was developing as a player,” he said. “Kids can’t sit on the bench and learn how to play anymore. They need to produce immediately or they’re gone.”

Kids who are serious about sports now don’t just spend hours practicing; they also spend hours building their brands. Today, just about every notable college prospect has dozens of tightly edited YouTube highlight reels and tens of thousands of Instagram followers. Top prospects used to meet one another at camps or at the annual McDonald’s All-American Game; they might have scanned one another’s names in the infrequent updates of high-school player rankings. Now those same players meet through social media and the booming youth-sports content business.

This is true across all kinds of activities. If you’re the best twelve-year-old chess player in a big city, you’ve probably competed in hundreds of online games against the other top twelve-year-olds across the world—you might even live-stream your matches and feed some of that content into the algorithms of TikTok and Instagram. Yogi Roth, an analyst at the Big Ten Network, has tracked the development of N.F.L. prospects for the past twenty-five years, and he believes that social media has fundamentally changed the experience of learning to play football. Roth played in college and coached for several years before going into television; in 2009, he became a producer and the host of “Elite 11,” which has been likened to “American Idol,” but for high-school quarterbacks. The show has featured sixteen future Heisman Trophy winners and was once a rare opportunity for players at that level to meet one another and compete. Now those connections are made online. “They find one another early,” Roth said. “And then they all get on the same club team, which draws even more connections.”

There are benefits to this hypervisibility—scholarship offers, attention from skilled trainers and coaches. But it also attracts predatory figures and creates additional pressure. Cautionary tales abound. The canonical basketball example is Julian Newman, whose highlight reels went viral when he was a fifth grader and not yet four and a half feet tall. He was written up in the Times and featured on “Good Morning America”; an online marketing machine was built around him, much of it orchestrated by his father. But Newman was just five feet seven when he finished high school, and no big-time college program wants a tiny shoot-first point guard who might arrive with a long list of demands. He spent the next five years as a fading YouTube celebrity, challenging other content creators to one-on-one battles.

The Spears family, in Texas.

Marcus Spears, Jr., does not have a large social-media following, nor does he spend much time with influencers—relative to other top prospects, he has little online presence, which is mostly by design. “I’m not going to monetize my fifteen-year-old,” his father told me. “I’m not interested in him having three hundred thousand followers.” But he and Aiysha understand that this is a privilege: parents who need the sponsorship money will understandably want to turn the hype around their talented children into funds, and some may even view it as the best choice for their kids. Spears said that he and his wife can see the downsides of that attention because of their experiences as pro athletes. “Also, if I need to fly to L.A. because the best knee doctor is out there, I can do it,” he added. “But, if I wasn’t in this position, and monetization on Instagram was going to allow my kid to go to the best doctor, then I would do that for them.”

All the former pros I talked to were frustrated by the intensity of youth sports as it exists now, but they still participated in the system because, well, what good parents wouldn’t do the same to insure that their children kept up with other talented kids? If I had a child who could potentially play basketball in college or the pros, I would pay for all the trainers everyone else was paying for—and then, if I could, I would send them to play at Dynamic for Coach O’Neal. Most people probably would. As O’Neal put it to me, “Wherever there’s kids, there’s parents. Wherever parents and kids go, they’re going to spend money.”

Not everyone at Dynamic, or at the programs it competes against, has money. The established schools offer scholarships; Dynamic is in an “incubator” phase, O’Neal told me, and so, for now, is not charging tuition. But the student athletes at these schools have all learned to play ball through careful instruction. In early April, a couple of weeks before the N.B.A. playoffs, the Chipotle Nationals began. The kids in these games had a long way to go, but they already played a facsimile of the pro game. Big guys shot threes, guards drove the lane and kicked the ball out for more threes. Gone are the days of novel high-school offensive sets or, at least on this level, wild invention.

More than a decade ago, I travelled to Oak Hill Academy to watch some practices. Most of the kids I saw went on to play big-time college hoops; the school drew a level of talent similar to Dynamic’s today. But, watching Dynamic practice, I was struck immediately by how fast they moved; I felt almost as if I were watching a different stage of evolution. “The game has become faster, more positionless, and more physically demanding,” Bill Duffy, a former N.B.A. draft pick and one of the top agents in the league, told me. “Players are training at a high level from a much younger age, and that’s changed not only how they move but how they think about the game. The style of play has evolved to match the speed and specialization that comes with early development.”

All that training has also led to a uniformity of play. “I absolutely hate it,” Marcus Spears, Sr., told me. That sameness comes from learning the game in a controlled environment, he said. “I think that’s why so many players from overseas are the top names in the N.B.A. now, because not only do they learn the technical side—they play the game with the old-school principle of playing against people who are older than you.” At the turn of the century, there were thirty-six foreign-born players in the N.B.A. Last year, there were a hundred and twenty-five. The top European teens play in pro leagues, against veterans. “You develop instincts in those situations,” Spears went on. American kids, no longer learning on the playground, were losing theirs, he believed. “You hear N.B.A. players that have been in the league a while say these young players suck. It’s not that they suck—it’s just they can’t do anything if you don’t tell them to. You need to make reads in the game, you need to deviate away from the play because it didn’t work. Now everybody just looks around, like, ‘What do I do now?’ ” One coach told the authors of the report published by Luka Dončić’s foundation, “Players don’t know how to anticipate where the ball will fall because they’re so used to their trainers getting their rebounds.”

Steve Nash told me that his effort “to be creative and imaginative” as a player was driven in large part by what he didn’t know—and that, as much as he envied some of the tools that young prospects now have, constant training likely would have altered that. O’Neal, too, saw this as a problem with the way basketball is now taught. “They are literally training these kids like robots, and the players don’t have any feel anymore,” he said. “That’s why all the players look alike now. Hell, half these kids don’t even watch basketball—they watch YouTube.”

At the Chipotle Nationals, O’Neal’s focus on defense, at least, seemed to pay off. Dynamic’s first game was against the vaunted Montverde, and his squad jumped out to an early 12–2 lead, largely owing to the players’ defensive effort. June, who came off the bench, was conspicuously the tallest person on the floor and also conspicuously among the youngest. He finished the game with respectable numbers—five points, five rebounds, and a block in sixteen minutes—and Dynamic managed an upset. The next day, Dynamic blew out Link Academy, the second-ranked team in the country. (The most recognizable name on Link’s roster is Andre Iguodala, Jr., whose father is a four-time N.B.A. champion.) Dynamic won again in Round Three, reaching the finals against Christopher Columbus High School, a Catholic prep school in Miami. Columbus was led by Cameron and Cayden Boozer, the twin sons of the two-time N.B.A. All-Star Carlos Boozer. In the title game, Cayden scored twenty-seven points, Cameron chipped in eleven with eight rebounds, and Columbus got another twelve rebounds from Jaxon Richardson, whose father, Jason, played fourteen seasons in the N.B.A. Columbus won by eighteen points, ending Dynamic’s unlikely run.

There’s no inherent reason that silver-spoon players have to produce an inferior product on the court. And a certain kind of basketball purist—the sort who hates any talk of narrative and is interested only in what happens between the lines on the floor—would roll his eyes at questions about where the handful of players who make the N.B.A. come from.

Still, let’s indulge in one last metaphor. Basketball is like jazz in so many ways that the analogy has become a cliché. As Wynton Marsalis once wrote, “Both reward improvisation and split-second decision making against the pressure of time.” Both are also Black art forms that require incredible discipline and a lifetime of study but which, when performed at their highest levels, encourage a freedom of expression that can take the audience into an ecstatic state. Every hoops fan can think of at least one such moment. For me, it was watching LeBron try to single-handedly beat the Golden State Warriors in the 2015 N.B.A. Finals after his two most talented teammates went down with injuries. James broke from the established tempo of the game and birthed a moment of ugly genius, walking the ball up the court, ordering his overmatched teammates around like a conductor, and almost breaking the spirit of their opponents, one of the best teams of all time.

Maybe this is nostalgia on my part. Perhaps athletes trained in state-of-the-art gyms can bring as much drama and charisma to the court as those who learned to play by trying to score against older guys on a run-down playground. But I’m not sure that basketball can survive as a major sport if it loses all connection to the narrative that has woven it so deeply into American culture. Basketball’s past may not be as virtuosic or as technically sound as its future, but part of why we watch the game is to witness the come-up—the pain of losing followed by the moment when years of work produce an instant of ingenuity that finally gets the superstar to the top. And, because we are sentimental, we want to know that the journey started on the blacktops of Akron, or in some dusty church gym in Indiana, or on the playgrounds of Coney Island. Every great American story is sentimental in the same way: instincts born out of struggle, the triumph of the schoolyard over the classroom, uncommon creativity driven by necessity. ♦

When Anna Dhody was growing up in Philadelphia, in the nineteen-eighties, her mother used the city’s museums as a kind of babysitter. “She would just drop me off at the Penn Museum and be, like, ‘Don’t touch anything, I’ll meet you at the totem poles in an hour,’ ” Dhody told me. One day, when she was in elementary school, her mother took her to the Mütter Museum. “I don’t think she knew what she was getting into,” Dhody said.

The Mütter, a museum of medical history, is stranger and less clinical than that description implies. Its dimly lit rooms are crowded with specimens of physical anomalies and pathologies: stillborn fetuses in jars, slices of faces suspended in an alcoholic solution, a wall of nineteenth-century skulls. One display case features the livers of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins who were widely exhibited as curiosities during the nineteenth century; in another is the corpse of a woman whose fat transformed after death in an unusual form of natural preservation called saponification. The Soap Lady, as she is known at the Mütter, has rough, blackened skin, and her mouth is open, as if in a scream. A banner outside the museum, which was founded more than a hundred and sixty years ago, reads “Disturbingly informative.” Every so often, a visitor faints.

“At what point are we just cosplaying ourselves from the nineties?”

Cartoon by Emily Flake

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Dhody is fifty, with a mobile, expressive face that she uses to comic effect. When she talks about her early visits to the Mütter, her eyes widen in wonder. “It was just so . . . interesting,” she said. On a trip to Belize as an undergraduate studying archeology, she excavated her first grave and was hooked: “You could read the bones, and it was like reading another language.” She went on to get a master’s degree in forensic science, intending to become a crime-scene investigator, but then the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, at Harvard, hired her to help it comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires institutions to return Indigenous human remains and other culturally significant items to tribal nations. In her late twenties, she interviewed for a short-term position at the Mütter. She ended up working there for nearly twenty years, most recently as the museum’s curator. “I was there before we had security cameras, and I would walk around in the mornings and talk to the babies in the jars and ask them how they were doing,” she said. “It’s not for a lot of people. But if it’s for you it’s really for you.”

During Dhody’s tenure, staff and invited guests often ate lunch at a communal table in the basement, under a large inflatable pteranodon. “It became a thing you didn’t want to miss,” Robert Hicks, a former director of the museum, said. They made Monty Python references and discussed the news or the reproductive systems of fish. People drawn to the Mütter often share a frank, forensic fascination with the human body and the stranger aspects of science. When the writer Mary Roach went to visit the Mütter offices, Hicks greeted her with one of his pet leeches hanging from his arm. “I asked what its name was, and he told me that it depended on the week, because apparently leeches change genders,” Roach recalled. “I just thought, This is my kind of place.”

“Specimens are the ways in which physicians in the nineteenth century were communicating ideas,” Erin McLeary said.

Dhody was proud of her work cultivating people willing to donate their own skeletons or other body parts to supplement the museum’s core collections, which mostly date from the nineteenth century. One of them, Robert Pendarvis, is a goateed man in his early sixties with a no-bullshit air. When Pendarvis was a young man, his ring size expanded from ten to fourteen, and his forearms got so beefy that his fellow construction workers called him Popeye. He went to see a former high-school classmate who had become a cardiologist. “Everyone else from high school looks the same, just older,” his friend told him. “But your face looks completely different from how it does in the yearbook.” Pendarvis was eventually diagnosed with acromegaly, a rare endocrine condition in which a pituitary tumor produces growth hormone into adulthood—“the gift that keeps on giving,” as Pendarvis put it.

Pendarvis learned that the Mütter had a skeleton of someone with acromegaly on display. After visiting it, he decided that he wanted to donate his own. It seemed like a fitting tribute to his extraordinary body and the ways it had shaped his life. When he looked into the idea, though, it sounded complicated. “There’s a whole process—you gotta find someone that’ll boil the skin off your bones, yada yada yada,” he said. A few years later, he was preparing for a heart transplant. When he asked Dhody if the museum would be interested in his original heart, “she just freaked,” he said. By the time the surgery took place, Pendarvis’s heart was roughly the size of a football, more than twice the average. When the heart was delivered to the Mütter via FedEx, Dhody filmed an unboxing video and posted it on YouTube. She told me, “There’s no other place like the Mütter is—or was.”

It’s well understood among museum professionals that people like to look at bodies. “We did a mummy exhibit in San Diego and attendance tripled,” Trish Biers, a former associate curator at the San Diego Museum of Us, told me. She now manages a human-remains collection at the University of Cambridge, where the skeleton of a Roman woman, on display in a lead-lined coffin, is one of the most popular attractions.

But such exhibits are coming under increased scrutiny. A recent wave of institutional reëxaminations, accelerated by George Floyd’s murder, in 2020, has had a “seismic” impact on museums holding human remains, according to the anthropologist Valerie DeLeon. It’s increasingly acknowledged that racism, colonialism, and eugenics have played a role in whose bodies end up on display. High-profile news stories have exposed the ugly provenance of items in élite institutions. The Smithsonian held a “racial brain collection,” amassed by a curator in the early twentieth century, purporting to prove the superiority of white people; the University of Pennsylvania owned hundreds of skulls collected by a man who came to be known as “the father of scientific racism.” Ethically questionable behavior isn’t just an artifact of the past: as recently as 2019, an anthropologist at Penn was using the remains of someone killed in the 1985 police bombing of the MOVEheadquarters as a teaching tool, without the consent of the family. (The anthropologist has said that the bones had not been conclusively identified.)

A new movement called for taking human remains that had not been obtained with explicit consent out of public view. In the past few years, the Rhode Island School of Design has returned a mummy to its sarcophagus, and the Hunterian, a medical museum in London, has replaced the seven-foot-seven skeleton of Charles Byrne, “the Irish Giant,” with an artwork. After consulting with native groups, Chile’s National Museum of Natural History has substituted realistic 3-D reconstructions for mummified bodies. Repatriation, which used to be confined largely to Indigenous communities, is now being considered more broadly; the Smithsonian’s Human Remains Task Force recently recommended that any of the collection’s tens of thousands of remains that were taken without permission—which is to say, the vast majority of them—should be offered “to their descendants and descendant communities, organizations, and institutions.”

In 2023, Dhody was on medical leave for a shoulder injury when she heard from colleagues that things were changing at the Mütter, too. Many specimens in the museum were obtained during surgeries and autopsies at almshouses, prison wards, and military field hospitals; few were collected with a contemporary understanding of consent. The museum had a new C.E.O., Mira Irons, and a new executive director, Kate Quinn, who told interviewers that she wanted the Mütter to focus more on well-being and public health. She instructed the staff to avoid “any possible perception of spectacle, oddities, or disrespect of any type.”

By the time that Dhody returned from leave, the museum’s leadership was midway through an ethical review of the collection’s provenance. But Dhody had already anticipated a different kind of risk. “In my opinion, one of our greatest threats is our own fan base if they feel the museum is being somehow threatened,” she cautioned in an internal memo she sent her bosses. “I don’t think it has been properly articulated how passionate these individuals are.”

In 1831, a recent University of Pennsylvania medical-school graduate named Thomas Mutter travelled to Paris, which was then a center of the emerging field of plastic surgery. When he returned to Philadelphia, a year later, he added an umlaut to his name and irritated his colleagues with his incessant chatter about the superiority of French surgeons.

In the early nineteenth century, surgery was performative and brutal. “Time me, gentlemen, time me!” a British surgeon bellowed to his students before amputations. (Once, during a hasty operation, he accidentally cut off an assistant’s fingers.) At the University of Pennsylvania, the nation’s first medical school, patients who agreed to be operated on in public could get their care for free, and physicians sometimes traded insults with their colleagues during operations, according to a biography of Mütter, by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz. Mütter was known for his colorful silk suits and for his skill in treating patients deemed “monsters”: people with proliferating tumors, say, or severe facial burns. The theatrical nature of the work suited him but, perhaps because of his own ailments—he was ill for much of his life and died in his late forties—he “appeared at operations to be painfully sympathetic with the suffering of the patient,” a fellow-physician noted. When anesthesia came into vogue in this country, in the eighteen-forties, he was the first surgeon in Philadelphia to use it.

Like many physicians of his time, Mütter amassed specimens for use in teaching, including realistic wax and plaster models and preserved human tissue and bones. After his death, in 1859, he left his collection—some two thousand objects—to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a fellowship organization for doctors, with the stipulation that it be presented as a museum. Mütter’s bequest was eventually supplemented by donations from other physicians and scientists. One otolaryngologist provided thousands of objects that he had extracted from patients’ throats and lungs: toys, coins, keys, and a medallion that read “Carry me for good luck.” Joseph Leidy, a paleontologist and an early enthusiast of forensics—he was reportedly the first person to help solve a murder using a microscope—was a prominent contributor. In the eighteen-seventies, he obtained the skeleton of a seven-foot-six man and the corpse of the saponified woman, which he acquired, as he noted on the receipt, via “connivance.” (Leidy donated his own brain to the American Anthropometric Society, as did Walt Whitman.) The Mütter collection came to include Grover Cleveland’s jaw tumor, a piece of one of John Wilkes Booth’s vertebrae, and slides of Albert Einstein’s brain.

Gretchen Worden, the director of the museum until 2004, said, “It’s everything. It’s art, it’s science, it’s bones, it’s anatomy, pathology, it’s contemporary medicine.”

This spring, I visited the Mütter, situated inside the grand Beaux-Arts headquarters of the College of Physicians, which still owns the museum. Erin McLeary, who was hired as the senior director of collections and research last year, met me in the lobby. We walked past high-ceilinged reception rooms toward the entrance to the Mütter, which was marked by a disclaimer. “You are about to enter a gallery containing human remains,” it cautioned. “If you wish to avoid this, please do not enter.”

McLeary wore a silk scarf tied around her neck and had an air of scholarly flutter. “Specimens are the ways in which physicians in the nineteenth century were communicating ideas,” she told me. “There’s a repeated phrase they use—that these are ‘nature’s books.’ As in, they can be read, they reveal information.” Around the nineteen-thirties, as the science of pathology evolved, such collections began to fall out of favor. “People are looking less at gross pathology—the big specimens—and more at microscopic changes. And there are different techniques for preservation,” McLeary said. We paused in front of a pale, fleshy object in a glass jar blurry with condensation. “Like this—this has lost some fidelity, right?” McLeary leaned in to read the label more closely; it was a foot.

Many institutions got rid of their specimens, likely disposing of them as medical waste or, in some cases, passing them on to the Mütter. Collections of pathological specimens came to be associated more with P. T. Barnum-style sideshows than with medical scholarship, although the two categories hadn’t always been clearly delineated. “There’s been a lot of resistance to the idea that medical schools even had collections like this,” McLeary said. “Someone at Penn was, like, ‘I don’t believe we ever had a collection like the Mütter’s.’ ” (They did.) “I think they’ve been memory-holed.”

The Mütter might have become an obscure collection, of interest mostly to historians, if not for a woman named Gretchen Worden. In 1974, Worden wrote to the Mütter’s curator asking for a job. She had a degree in anthropology from Temple University and no full-time work experience. “As for vital statistics, I was born in Shanghai, China, on September 26, 1947. I have since grown to a height of five feet, eight and three-quarters inches and can get things down from a seven-foot shelf. I am fairly proficient in English, barely proficient in French, and have forgotten most of my Russian,” she wrote. In lieu of a résumé, she included her college transcript. Worden was hired, and spent the rest of her life at the museum.

Anatomical collections like the Mütter’s had long inspired feelings of fascination and shame about the human body. In Victorian London, the proprietors of anatomical displays were sometimes prosecuted for indecency. For many years, the Hunterian museum was open only to medical professionals, “learned men,” or “respectably dressed persons.” But Worden, who became the Mütter’s director, promoted the museum through multiple appearances on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, where she showed off objects that made the audience groan or erupt in shocked laughter. (“Good Lord,” you can hear someone say, after she shows Letterman a photograph of a wax model with gnarly facial lesions.) She and the publisher Laura Lindgren invited artists, including William Wegman, to photograph the collection for a calendar distributed in bookstores around the country. Worden also cultivated the museum’s distinctive Victorian atmosphere: heavy velvet drapes, red carpets, wooden cases packed with specimens. As some institutions got rid of their anatomical collections, Worden snapped them up. “I am almost totally fulfilled here in this job. It’s everything. It’s art, it’s science, it’s bones, it’s anatomy, pathology, it’s contemporary medicine. I just couldn’t be happier,” she once told the Philadelphia Daily News.

Regal and unapologetically odd, Worden shaped the museum in her image. Questions of spectacle and propriety circled the Mütter even then, but Worden’s ample charisma, her confidence in the validity of her own fascination, seemed largely able to keep them at bay. She saw the museum as a place for “humans looking at humans,” somewhere that “treats people as if they’re grown up enough to take a look at what’s under the hood.” By the end of her tenure, attendance had grown more than tenfold.

Worden died in 2004, at fifty-six, after a brief illness. An article in the Times noted the “motley crowd” that gathered for her memorial service at the museum, which included “dignified-looking surgeons,” “Philadelphia society matrons,” and “a couple of sideshow impresarios.” The mourners sang “Babies in Jars,” a song composed to the tune of “My Favorite Things.”

Valerie DeLeon, the anthropologist, began a two-year stint as the president of the American Association for Anatomy in 2021, as her field was coming under intense scrutiny for its treatment of human remains. DeLeon convened a task force to devise best practices for institutions with historical collections of remains, an area with hardly any regulatory guidance. She felt that it was important to move quickly. “The members that I represent needed help now,” she told me. (The University of Florida, where she is a professor, was weighing how to handle its own anatomical teaching collections.) The task force included anthropologists, anatomists, and museum professionals. They agreed that it was important to treat human specimens with dignity and respect, but they disagreed about what that meant in practice. Some argued that, given the presumptive unethical taint of such collections, human remains should be buried or otherwise respectfully disposed of. Another faction argued that the societal benefits of continuing to research, teach with, and display human remains outweighed the harms to people who were, after all, long dead.

Human tissues “hold an ethically intermediary place between inanimate property and living beings,” the members of the task force wrote in a report, which was published in The Anatomical Record last year. First, the group had some thorny discussions, DeLeon said. Just how much of a body counted as a person? Did a bone shard have the same level of personhood as a full skeleton? What about teeth, or tumor cells? Should fetal remains be considered part of the mother or a separate person? Did the long dead occupy a different status from those who had died more recently?

In the report, the group laid out its guidelines, which recommend taking cultural context into account when determining how to display or dispose of remains, given that practices such as cremation or postmortem display may be considered traditional by one culture and taboo by another. Whenever possible, the A.A.A. recommends consulting with “communities of care”—descendants or others with an interest in and a connection to the remains. But it’s not always clear who is best positioned to speak for the dead. “For many remains, even within my own institution, we literally have no idea where they came from,” DeLeon said. “So what do you do with those?”

In Philadelphia, I met Kate Quinn, the Mütter’s executive director, in one of the College of Physicians’ anterooms, whose walls were lined with mahogany bookshelves and oil paintings of eminent physicians. Quinn had an air of guarded professionalism, and for most of the interview she was flanked by both a P.R. representative and her new boss, Larry Kaiser, a thoracic surgeon who had recently been named the president and C.E.O. of the College of Physicians.

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After Quinn’s hiring, in 2022, she quickly moved to professionalize the Mütter, helping to establish policies for ethics and beginning the process of applying for accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums. She sometimes received calls from people who had been told by Dhody that the Mütter might acquire their body parts; Quinn told them that the museum wasn’t doing that at the moment. She oversaw an audit of the collection, the first in more than eighty years. “I had the expectation that we would find that maybe two or three per cent of the collection had been given to us with consent,” she told me. “But we’re finding it’s much, much less than that.”

Stacey Mann, a consultant who was brought in by Quinn, told me it seemed that the collection was haphazardly catalogued, with some things apparently acquired because of their value as curiosities rather than as medically informative specimens. “They found two of these baby skulls in the library that were linked to this woman who was, I guess, a murderess,” Mann said. (The bodies were discovered in a trunk after the woman, Stella Williamson, died, in 1980; the exact circumstances of their deaths are unclear. The museum is helping to arrange a reburial.) “Every month, there’d be another thing that was, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”

Quinn also spearheaded something called the Postmortem project, an example of the kind of institutional self-critique that has become popular in the museum world in the past few years. At the Mütter, this has meant providing visitors with visual annotations to the existing collection in the form of green signs. Near the entrance, for example, a sepia-tinged photograph shows the back of a woman’s head. A matted lock of hair trails down her back in calligraphic spirals, an example of plica, a rare disorder. Like many objects in the Mütter’s collection, it is unsettlingly compelling, the distance of time imbuing the pathology with a kind of poetry. “This photo comes from a book of hair samples doctors took from patients with different ethnic backgrounds,” the Postmortem sign affixed to the display reads. “Is this just a picture of hair when you know that it was used to perpetuate racism?” One of the museum’s temporary galleries is devoted to the Postmortem project, and its atmosphere—white painted walls; bright, clean light; exhibits with clear, legible signage—feels like a portal into an entirely different institution. Next to a display about power and consent, visitors are invited to contribute their responses on butcher paper: “SCARY PEOPLE,” “acknowledge the ugly past,” “Wokeness destroys truth.”

Quinn walked me through an exhibit that had been on display for more than a decade, and which linked items in the collection to Grimms’ Fairy Tales. In a broad wooden case, a small, brownish object that resembled a piece of ginger root rested on a shelf. “That’s the bound foot of a Chinese woman,” Quinn said. “It’s on display to talk about Cinderella. And it’s a question, you know—is that something we should be doing more or less of? Whose story is being prioritized there? It’s not her story. Her background is not even part of the display at all—it’s all about Cinderella, and foot-binding, and it’s next to a book with illustrations of shoes. This doesn’t mean that we don’t share that specimen moving forward, but maybe we’re telling a different story about it.”

Under Quinn and Irons’s leadership, the museum cancelled its annual Halloween party and stopped hosting a popular goth-tinged craft bazaar. Then, in early 2023, the museum removed hundreds of videos from its YouTube channel and took down a digital exhibit featuring images of human remains. The videos, most of which were made by Dhody, were often irreverent and sometimes involved staff members goofing around in the museum. The YouTube channel was popular, with more than a hundred thousand subscribers. Dhody, sounding wounded, told me that Quinn had characterized it, disparagingly, as “edutainment.” According to Quinn, the museum planned to review the videos for accuracy and tone. (Eventually, about a third of them were reposted, although none that included human remains.) But some of the museum’s fans saw their sudden disappearance as a harbinger of worse things to come. Online, rumors spread that the new leadership planned to remove the fetal remains, or to close the museum to the public altogether.

Models of heads, intended for use in obstetric training.

A half-dozen or so of the Mütter’s most ardent enthusiasts—members of the “weird little parasocial network attached to the museum,” as one described it to me—formed a group called Protect the Mütter, to protest the changes. They handed out flyers around town, sold T-shirts that read “Censorship is the enemy of science,” and kept up a regular cadence of outraged social-media posts “looking out for the well being of our deceased friends” and criticizing the new leadership’s “sweeping, judgmental, reactive moves.” More than a dozen employees departed, including Dhody, who resigned last year, saying that she felt “shuttled off to the sidelines.” A woman who had donated her uterine fibroid to the Mütter demanded it back, saying that she had lost confidence in the institution’s leadership. Robert Hicks, the former director, accused Quinn and Irons of being “elitist and exclusionary,” and removed the Mütter from his will.

Protect the Mütter was run by a self-described “scrappy group of neurodivergent queers” who posted land acknowledgments on the organization’s Instagram page. Their campaign attracted some unexpected allies. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, a former trustee of the College of Physicians blamed “cancel culture” and “a handful of woke elites” for jeopardizing the museum’s future. “Two women put in charge of TOTALLY COOL museum of oddities, The Mütter Museum, think the exhibits are icky and plan to destroy it,” the conservative pundit Ann Coulter posted on Twitter. “Is there anything women can’t wreck?” Pendarvis, who had donated his heart, told me that he was disgusted by the new leadership’s “wokeness and the bullshit about D.E.I.”; he, too, asked for his specimen back. “When I saw that Ann Coulter thought I was on the right track, I sat there and said, ‘My God, what is happening?’ ” the Protect the Mütter member told me. “But you know how a broken clock is right two times a day.”

Protect the Mütter created a petition—signed by more than thirty thousand people, including Roach, the magician Penn Jillette, and the novelist Neil Gaiman—that called for the dismissal of Irons and Quinn, among other measures. Irons resigned in September, 2023. When I met with Quinn, she spoke of that period with a kind of brittle diplomacy. “It was a solid year of recognizing that there are a lot of folks who have strong passions for this place, and rightly so,” she said. She was eager to “facilitate the discussions” and “get folks engaged in the conversation.” The one moment when Quinn’s composure wavered was when I asked her if she thought gender had played a role in the ire directed against her. “I do, I do think that,” she said with surprising vehemence. “I had a lot of attacks on the way that I look. Someone called me a bland blond normie. Someone said that I must be conservative and anti-abortion because I would roll up the sleeves on my blazer. And someone else said that I wore minimalistic 2011 makeup.” Then she seemed to catch herself. “But we carry on and continue forward.”

McLeary has been leading the effort to learn more about the people whose bodies and body parts have ended up at the Mütter. Non-experts often assume that DNA analysis can provide the solution to all mysteries, supplying a name and a family tree. But such testing is often prohibitively expensive and, when dealing with historic specimens, not consistently precise. Instead, the Mütter has relied largely on archival research. Last year, after McLeary was hired, she went looking for the nineteenth-century collection catalogue, which she found in the College of Physicians’ library. “Maybe it was when Gretchen died, I don’t know, but at some point staff just ceased knowing about this,” she told me. She set the book on a stand and began to page through it with me. It was dense with notes, some typewritten and some in tiny, precise handwriting: “skull of a typical mouth breather,” “a Chinese skull,” “a heavy skull.” Many of the listings included lengthy case reports from the physicians who had donated the specimens. Owing in part to prevailing nineteenth-century ideas about how certain diseases tracked with race, class, and life style, the entries are often rich in sociological detail, which—when cross-referenced with newly digitized historical archives—has helped McLeary and her team attach context, and in some cases a name, to hundreds of specimens.

This research is just the first step in a process that may eventually involve contacting descendants, a project that would have its own set of complications. McLeary paused at an entry describing the skull of a man sentenced to death for murder. “You think about these what-ifs—what if you contacted these descendants? The crimes he committed were horrible,” she said. “ ‘Did you know that your great-great-grandfather might have sexually assaulted his daughter and then killed her? Do you want his skull back?’ ”

Thomas Mütter, whose collection of medical specimens formed the origin of the museum.

I followed McLeary into the museum’s main room, past a group of teen-age girls transfixed by an exhibit on teratology, the study of congenital abnormalities. We stopped in front of a child’s skeleton, about three feet tall, with an enlarged skull and bones blackened with age. “Hydrocephalus has caused this child’s head to grow to a circumference of over 27 inches,” the label read. “After six years of expanding rapidly, the skull has numerous wormian bones—small, irregular bones between the bones normally present in the skull.” The child’s name, McLeary had determined, was Thomas Jeff, and he had died of complications from the condition in 1882, when he was six or seven years old. He had lived with his family in a low-income neighborhood in Philadelphia. During his lifetime, he’d occasionally been put on display for money. After his death, his mother sold the body to a doctor, for some six hundred dollars in today’s money. “There’s a short newspaper article about his sale, in which his mother says, If we buried him, he would just be grave-robbed—it was going to happen either way,” McLeary said. She said that focussing on contemporary notions of consent could risk reading the present into the past—essentially looking for “something that simply didn’t exist,” as she put it—but that archival work could build a better understanding of individuals’ agency and bodily autonomy, both during life and afterward, and that this understanding could help guide the museum’s decisions.

With that in mind, the research team had selected Jeff as a case study; they were seeing how much of his life they could piece together beyond his name. McLeary found that Jeff’s mother, Letitia, died not long after her son; records list her place of burial as Jefferson Medical College, which means that her body may have been used to teach dissection. With help from the African American Genealogy Group, in Philadelphia, the team was able to trace the path of Jeff’s two younger brothers to a Quaker orphanage. Afterward, one brother was placed in indenture at a farm in Delaware and the other was sent to a residential school for Black and Native children, where he was second in his class, according to a report card that a researcher at Haverford College tracked down. I glanced at the small skeleton, now freighted with a name and a history. It seemed to demand a different kind of looking. “You know, Thomas Jeff’s father voted in 1870, as a newly enfranchised Black man,” McLeary said. “There’s a whole history of the American Black experience that we can tell, and to me that’s a far more interesting thing to think about than hydrocephaly.”

In the past two years, the Mütter’s attendance numbers and gift-shop sales have declined, and the College of Physicians, which relies in part on the museum’s income, is running a deficit. Kaiser, who became the College’s C.E.O. earlier this year, told me that he has a “broader view” of the ethics of display. “Look, from the business perspective, I depend on admissions to the museum and the gift shop,” he said. “I like people coming here for whatever reason, whether it’s morbid fascination or education or simply entertainment. I’m O.K. with that.” Kaiser spent most of my interview with Quinn looking at his phone. He spoke up when I asked her if visiting the museum should be fun. “Yes!” he said emphatically, before she could reply.

A week later, I heard that Quinn’s position had been eliminated. On Instagram, Protect the Mütter declared victory and posted an image of two skeletal hands, their bony fingers pressed together to make a heart shape. The museum will now be run by McLeary and Sara Ray, a historian of science. Both women stressed to me their love of the institution, as well as their understanding that it needed to evolve. Ray mentioned that she’d been a volunteer tour guide a decade ago. “When I came back in January, I was shadowing a docent, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, this docent is giving the same—literally the same—tour,’ ” she said. “For all of the talk about changes to the collection, really there’s not that much in the core gallery that has changed.” The turmoil surrounding the museum’s direction ultimately seemed to be less about major alterations to the space than about a shift in emotional tone, a movement away from celebration and toward something like penance.

McLeary and Ray see the research into the collection’s origins as a form of appreciation; what is the Mütter, after all, if not a place where people go to be disturbed? “The way this controversy has been depicted is that you either need to commit yourself to ethics or you need to commit yourself to being a place of morbid fascination,” Ray said. “We think there’s a secret third way, which is that you can actually do both of those things.”

One of the Mütter’s most ambivalent defenders is the Chicago artist, writer, and disability activist Riva Lehrer. “I have a really deep love of the variance of anatomy—all the ways you can be human, all the different ways you can live in a body,” Lehrer, who has spina bifida, told me. She has taught anatomy and has been a visiting artist in a cadaver lab, where she donned scrubs and observed as medical students wielded their scalpels. “And, then, I’ve had quite a few surgeries, so I’ve done a lot of medical research on my own,” she added.

On Lehrer’s first visit to the museum, in 2006, she found it “immediately fascinating,” but the moody lighting and sideshow atmospherics struck her as both offensive and trite. “I was feeling sniffy about the whole thing,” she said. Downstairs, she entered the exhibit devoted to teratology. Preserved fetuses hung submerged in jars, swollen from preservation fluid and bleached to a uniform, milky white. “I know people with a vast amount of variance, so I’m looking at all these bodies and thinking, Oh, this reminds me of John, this reminds me of Mary Lou, but I wasn’t thinking about myself. You find out how defended you are when you can’t be anymore. And then I turned the corner—I mean literally and figuratively,” she said. “It was like my armor fell off.” On display was a small, pale body that appeared to have spina bifida lipomyelomeningocele, the rare variation that Lehrer has. She felt as if she were encountering herself. She longed to slip the jar in her pocket. “Nature does all this stuff—it’s such a bag of chaos, you know?” she said. “We’re born into this chaos, and we grow up, and then we’re, like, Well, now what do I do in this body I landed in?” she said. “What am I supposed to do with this?” ♦

It makes sense notionally, a painless hypothesis
for our predicament, crayoned face to bridge
the gulf between grace and the lightning storm.
But why should God be imagined as human—heavens,
dogs are nobler creatures, to say nothing of whales
or oak trees—and why as a man? Why should God
be gendered any more than potassium or gravity?
If a coconut falls on your head, you don’t question its
sexuality. You curse, flail, you might even die,
poor donkey of the body tapping out, farewell.
Death doesn’t scare the body because all the body wants
is to lie on the couch with a golf tournament on TV
but the mind is drip, drip, drip, drip, relentless.
It wants God to be more than a notion, it wants God
to be real so it can escape the hairy carcass
and rise—eternity seems always to be an ascension—
the mind wants to climb that ladder while the body
prefers to bask in a confetti of chatter,
the mind wants to study the stars from the roof
and imagine an afterlife it understands
deep down, in its python coils, to be nothing
but a metaphor, a hunger for reassurance, a telescope
resolving the night into a zodiac of consolation.